451 Research curated a survey that highlights decisions, challenges and considerations when it comes to workload/application deployment and best execution venues. While heading to the public cloud is a popular option, it is only one choice of many.

Information Technology organizations are faced with leading the charge in the digital transformation and, at the same time, must manage the day-to-day activities that keep enterprises running. In order to manage application characteristics, end-user profiles, data locality, security, performance requirements and sunk capital investments, a “hybrid by default” environment is often adopted.

The 451 Survey indicates that in 2020, 38% of organizations will adopt a hybrid cloud model (hosting data on-premises and in the cloud). Companies adopting this model are doing so because of legacy technical debt, data protection, compliance and privacy needs. Enterprises with 1,000 employees or more – especially in the finance and utilities spaces – will leverage PaaS and IaaS to manage their workloads.

While different sectors are poised for different strategy, according to the 451 Research survey, 44% of respondents are planning to adopt a “modernization in place” approach. They will keep workloads on-premises but will also update the underlying application/infrastructure architecture.